So the moral status of a thing is not what is important. What is important is the degree to which the moral status of a thing is important. Even though we do not know exactly what the status of a fetus is in comparison to us, or an existing being, but we do know that a fetus will eventually become an existing being, and so it is a potential person and potential life. It is hard to put the moral status of what exists now ahead of the moral status of what will eventually exist, because then we would have to perform all of our actions according to what benefits us the most right now. We would not worry about future people or even our future selves, because they do not exist now. At the same time, existence is quite an important part of having moral status, because if you do not exist then you cannot have any status at all. We also cannot ever know for sure what will happen in the future, and so therefore, we cannot use potentiality in order to weigh the moral status of a thing.
What we can consider, in order to decide what characteristics are not legitimate for judging moral status, is the fact that all born humans have the same moral status (both type and magnitude), or we consider them to anyway. So anything that differs among born humans, such as intelligence, obligation, responsibility, capacity, superiority, etc. cannot be used to compare the moral status of fetus’s and animals.
Another way to look at moral status is to think about whether it is legitimate to harm something simply for our personal enjoyment. Killing or hurting a fetus or an animal for fun is not something that most rational people would consider morally okay. So what makes it alright to harm or kill something? For this we must consider consequences and utility, for both the thing we are discussing, and for the other parties involved. As far as fetus’ and animals go, we can look at which has the greater capacity for utility. This is very hard to judge however, because we do not know whether a fetus or animal can even experience utility at all, never mind in the same way as we do. The ability of a thing to comprehend its own experience may be important as well. The troubling part of making these judgments is that we are not and cannot be anything besides born humans, which means that we can never know the extent to which a fetus or less intelligent animal experiences utility.
So what about our utility in all of this? We seem to judge whether or not to harm or kill a fetus or animal based on the consequences for us. As previously discussed, we generally prefer to not harm or kill either animals or fetuses if we do not have to, and we generally consider it wrong to harm or kill them purely for our pleasure. We do, however, abort a fetus if keeping it will result in a situation of less utility (for all parties involved), and we kill animals in order to provide ourselves with their body parts for food and clothing. Since it is possible to get what we use from animals in other ways, we obviously only kill them out of ease, and so it is a matter of utility as well. So we kill both fetuses and animals to maximize our own happiness, but which are we more reluctant to kill for our happiness?
It seems as if we are more reluctant to abort a fetus, but this is probably due to the fact that we are considering the potential utility or disutility of the future human the fetus will become. This must be considered though if the bad side to having the child is that it will cause other parties involved disutility. It seems that if we abort a fetus due to the fact that we believe it will cause us disutility, then it usually follows that the child who would have been born would probably add only more disutility to the situation. A child that causes disutility to the people around it will most likely not gain enough utility to make up for it even if it has positive utility for itself. We also have no way of knowing how much utility/disutility will result from having/not having a child, we can only guess. When we kill an animal, we know that it is losing utility and that we are gaining it, and we tend to decide that the utility that we receive from being able to get our food and clothing from the death of the animal outweighs the negative utility of the animal.
So since we have a greater grasp of what will happen when we kill animals as opposed to fetuses, we are less reluctant to kill them. On the other hand, is the utility gained by killing animals necessarily more preferable than the disutility escaped by aborting a fetus? It seems that when we kill a fetus, we do so because the risks of disutility are too great, whereas when we kill a single animal, we do so because the utility of the people involved will go up slightly, or at least not go down. If an animal lives, there is no loss in utility, and if it is killed, there is usually agreed to be a slight increase in utility. If a fetus is born, it has the potential to lower, raise, or not change overall utility, and if it is aborted (assuming that we used our best judgment in doing so), it will definitely save us a loss in utility. It seems reasonable to say that the benefits of saving ourselves this loss in utility outweigh the benefits of the utility we gain from killing animals. Does this tell us anything about the moral status of fetuses in comparison to animals?
When looking at certain factors like this we run into another dilemma. We might be able to give ourselves greater moral status than animals, but it is not certain that these differences between us and animals hold for a fetus. It is certain that a fetus will have more nerves than an animal once it is born, and it will have a greater capacity for disutility and unhappiness, but these are only potentialities, and as we have discussed, it is hard to judge moral status with potentialities.
What I believe it comes down to is this. A fetus staying alive has the potential to raise overall utility much more than any single animal staying alive. At the same time, aborting a fetus (which we would only do if we were as sure as possible that it’s staying alive would lower overall utility) is an overall better decision for the sake of utility than killing any single animal. So what does this mean? Perhaps the animal has greater moral status because aborting a fetus is almost always a better decision for the maximizing of utility than killing an animal is. Or perhaps the fetus has greater moral status because it is much harder to predict the outcome of an abortion for utility, and the life or death of a fetus has a much greater potentiality to greatly rise or greatly lower utility and thus an overall greater influence on utility. It seems that a main problem is the fact that circumstances and consequences play a much greater role in judging whether or not to abort a fetus in comparison to the relative certainty in the outcome of killing an animal.
